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Holland Bans AMD's 'Virus Protection' Campaign
Hack Jandy writes "For those of you who didn't see this coming, AMD's Advanced Virus Protection campaign has been banned in Holland since the technology does (almost) nothing to stop viruses! If you recall, AMD's NX bit attempts to stop the processor from executing pages on the stack that have been written to. Does NX even solve more problems than it causes?"
What the "NX bit" actually does is a pretty nice thing for preventing buffer overflows... if a segment of memory is marked for data use and then the code execution point somehow arrives there, you get a crash-out instead of the execution of arbitrary code.
Of course, AMD's problem is finding a way to try to communicate that concept to the average user. Joe Sixpack doesn't even know what buffer overflow problem is, so they don't understand why they need a solution to that problem. AMD is trying to use the concept of "virus prevention" instead, but apparently they've gone too far in implying that the NX bit eliminates the need for conventional anti-virus methods, which it most certainly does not.
This is an extra set of suspenders, not a new belt.
I guess what it comes down to is whether the old people that run Holland want digital signatures.
It helps deal with buffer overflows which is a way to deal with some malware exploiting them.
I don't understand really why AMD felt a need to make an ad campaign over the technology anyway. Most uses for this technology are buffer overflow preventions, which are almost exclusively server technology. Admittedly, it is possible for any program that makes a remote connection to accept data or idles waiting for data to possibly be vulnerable, but for a userland machine this would be mostly messaging programs and p2p programs.
I think it would have made sense to put it as a nice side feature so that geeks see the technology and how it prevents buffer overflows, but they probably already know about it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
NX doesn't cause any problems asshat, it is something that real CPUs have had for years, that allows an OS to make sure no pages of memory are both writable and executable, helping prevent exploit code from working.
Exploits rarely execute from the Stack but rather the printer buffer.
...
Great! so I'm safe, as I have no printer connected to this computer! all those silly antivirus customers
NX by itself does nothing. An OS can use NX to impliment something half-assed like you are talking about (windows), or it can do it correctly, like openbsd, and at least one patch for linux. NX is great, windows is overated.
Does this NX thing rely on the evil bit? If so, no wonder it doesn't work! *duck*
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
Yeah, I doubt AMD has anything to worry about. Personally, I'm not worried about viruses, I keep my windows updated, and I don't download stupid shit. (And when I do, I scan it.)
-gjr
Windows XP uses NX now as of SP2. Its part of its Data Execution Protection scheme. DEP can run without an AMD too. Its on by default for windows system files.
Buffer overflow exploits arent just for servers either, the RPC/DCOM exploit was one. So was the previous big worm, err blaster? I don't quite remember.
This is tech for the desktop, really. Modern computers run a slew of services.
Oops, I wasn't finished...
The X-bit article body says Netherlands, but the title says Holland. Holland is a sub-region of Netherlands. Maybe it really doesn't matter all that much to me, but there is a difference, and some people get picky about what their country is called, and this is a common mistake for Americans to make.
Hardware for preemptive multitasking... built in to the chip and not just software... not really having anything to do with viruses but more about buggy code. I must be thinking about something else...
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Given that, in common parlance, most people don't know the differences between the various exploits "virus" is as good a word as any.
And if the NX bit were used for more than the stack, then it could protect against a lot of (non-trojan) viral activity too.
Lets face it most viruses today aren't even viruses. They are trojans, worms, and human-engeneering exploits. How often do you see an actual virus? You know a program that writes its code into another program. It's actually getting kind of rare. Now days it is whole applications delivering themselves to your computer through email and exploiting the existing code of crap like IE and Outlook by just telling those programs to run the evil code. Most exploits today are applets and packages.
All But Gone are the days of rewritten exe headers wiht appended code fragments, and programs appending themselves to other programs in memory.
Quite frankly if all the non-code memory regions in my computer were non-execute down to the very last GDI region and printer buffer, the classic virus would be dead. The IE hacks and the trojans and the worms would still be here because certian stupid programs will do arbitrarily complex things at the behest of remote entities, but that isn't a virus. Thats bad design comming home to roost.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
You do understand what a buffer overflow is right?
Almost all CPU advertising is misleading, first of all because it has to paint with such a broad brush. The NX bit plays only a tiny role in virus prevention. The much-hyped Hyperthreading was only of questionable benefit and certainly not worth paying extra license costs for most people. Dual cores may be a mixed bag if I read my cards correctly. I can think of lots of examples... But, misleading advertising is allowed anyway.
Well, I guess this time someone got caught. I hope this trend continues. If I have to be subject to censorship rules, why shouldn't the marketing people at AMD?
Holland, Zeeland, and Friesland(sp?) make up the Netherlands iirc.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
For the rest of the world Holland and The Netherlands are exactly equivalent.
The people behind X-bit Labs are Russian and Estonian, but don't let that stop you from taking a shot at Americans.
A buffer overflow is similar to getting raped by a member of the GNAA. Somebody is trying to put something where there is not enough room to hold it. In the case of computers, there is not enough memory to hold the information. The information is written to memory outside of the space allocated for the particular program. In the case of Gay Niggers, your virgin ass can not hope to contain the glory that is the ten inch Gay Nigger Dong. So your asshole explodes in a rush of blood and shit...aw yeah...what was I talking about again?
Scan it for what, the evil bit? Given that the technology is designed to help stop buffer overflows, it has little to do with virus scans.
My father is from the Netherlands and he always told me that 'Holland' was the name of one of several colonies in the area that eventually became the Netherlands.
There's no place like
Good luck writing the address of system() when that address is different every time the program runs. No one thing is a silver bullet, you use a complete solution like openbsd.
I actually believe that the word for "Netherlands" in Japanese is "Oranda", which would be some sort of a borrowing of "Holland". So it's not just us American lamers that fail to make the distinction.
Moll.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland, Zeeland, ... To be exact.
Friesland, Groningen, Brabant, Limburg,
Drente, Overijssel, Gelderland, Utrecht
and Flevoland.
I will work to elevate you, just enough to bring you down
Fedora has had support for a while. And really, it would be windows copying openbsd, which has had it much longer.
...then I actually RTFA.So it appears that the complaint wasn't against the claim NX "protects against viruses", the complaint was that the advertisements did not make necessary disclaimers like "requires special operating system support". This seems definitely reasonable on the regulators' part.
This said, I have heard it claimed that NX technology is rediculously easy to circumvent. Specifically, I saw a long post by Linus Tourvalds somewhere in which he noted that NX provided protection against some classes of buffer overflow attacks, but not all, and then outlined various ways in which someone attempting a buffer overflow under Linux could potentially simply structure their buffer overflow so as to circumvent the protections NX offers. The post was very technical and I could not tell if the statements were general or just byproducts of the way Linux handles stack and such. Does WinXP suffer from these same problems with regard to the efficacy of an NX bit?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
With Windows, however, the problem is sloppy system design. the NX bit does little to protect users from an OS that is designed insecurely. That's not to say that MS doesn't also have it's share of programmers who make mistakes that allow buffer overflows, etc. -- but that problem just gets lost in the systemic noise.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
In a recent cluster installation, we noticed that any tool (IBM's RAID console and the PolyServe cluster files system managment console) involving Java aborted with SIGSEGV errors. This was a Redhat ES 3.0 u3 installation on IBM e336 (dual Xeon 3.06 GHz) systems. Run the tools, immediate BOOM!
Noting that the problem was the JRE blowing itself out of the water with SIGSEGV (and talking to friends that had installed the same OS and same software on different hardware) led me to do some more research. "strace" can indeed be your friend. It seems that AFAICT the NX feature was added to the Xeon processor versions (stepping) that were in our machines. There was no way to disable the feature in the BIOS. There is a little, er, confusion in the various documentation about the kernel's behavior, but "noexec=on" is the default as far as I can tell.
So, what (apparently) happened here?
[personal opinion] Intel, rushing to counter the AMD marketing blitz about the wonders of "no execute", put the feature into their newest Xeon CPUs, possibly before the BIOS functionality caught up. The Linux kernel's choice of defaulting the new feature to "on" (theoretically the best choice) unfortunately resulted in numerous "issues", particularly in applications (simulators, virtual machines, etc.) that commonly execute things within the stack segment. This is done all the time in this class of application. The software development community hadn't caught up to the new feature, either. It seems that there are linker attributes that can disable the behavior (still researching this). [/personal opinion]
If you Google for this issue you will find that virtually (pun intended) anyone that relies on a JRE on Linux (Oracle, IBM, etc.) was affected iff the hardware did the NX bit. Our solution was to download the latest JRE from a source on the Web (Sun in this case) and hope that we did not run into Java compatibility issues or that the JRE versions in the software packages were not bolted in.
We squeaked by with our solution, but it only cost about a whole day figuring it out. Time is cheap. Technical problems are fun, especially with a customer watching all of the game over your shoulder. "You have done this before, right?"
When you say "Americans," do you mean to include Canadians, Mexicans, Brazilians, Cubans, and Jamaicans, or were you just referring to US citizens?
I was speaking to someone on a forum just recently, and they mentioned how their processor had "built in virus scanning." After a bit of an argument (he was quite convinced that it was truly virus scanning) I ended up correcting him, and simply explained that it could help stop a "bad program from tricking your computer into doing something it shouldn't."
... because it's definetly misleading to those who don't understand what it does and can easily become an issue of semantics for people who might confuse "virus protection" with "antivirus software." And in a world where the blue E on grandma's desktop = The Internet(TM) this may be happening more than it's apparent.
It's a shame that they couldn't come up with a better way to market this
Who doesn't like free music?
How would supporting an AMD chip feature be copying Microsoft? Wouldn't it be copying AMD?
This is a distinction which Joe Sixpack has a terrible time grasping. Telling someone "Your computer's got worms!" is less likely to be comprehend than "Your computer has a virus", further complicating the difficulty of explaining to Joe Sixpack that hardware buffer overflow protection could save him from the next Windows worm...
What about self -modifying code?
Hey, I'm really sorry; I try not to let stuff like this get to me, but for this one I just can't resist. I have to say it:
Your sig sucks.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
No choice to make - you choose AMD for the CHEAP thrill.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
Hmm, as far as I can tell Linux has no functionality where the "Start Menu", "User Switching", or the "middle mouse button" are concerned.
However, perhaps in your ignorance you meant "GNU/Linux", though really I think you just mean GNU or more generally opensource.
In which case here I am in Gnome2...Where is that Start Menu again?
User switching? Oh yeah, I disabled that in Windows because it was so annoying (I mean, you have to do the windows update every day to stay safe, then you have to find whoever logged in to make sure they shut their apps down, etc).
Middle mouse button? What useful feature does that have in Windows. At least I can paste with it in X, which is quite the timesaving feature.
"etc" - Does that include FUD?
The Golden Rule - "A Troll for a Troll"
I can understand the stance that the Dutch took in regards to the NX issue. Ultimately, these commissions need to ensure that the information given out by companies such as AMD are as clear and accurate as possible, and I'm sorry, when they say, "advanced virus protection", after putting my end-user hat on for two minutes, what the advertisement is basically saying is this; "throw out all your anti-virus software, this new CPU can not only protect you like a normal virus protector, but does it even better!"
With that being said, however, the other flip side is how thinly do they want to slice the information; many things in IT can't be simplistically put down to a few catch words; the people to blame for this over simplification aren't the engineers, most engineers would love to give the information straight to the customer and say "here is the information, make you decision based on that", on the other side, the people who sell these products tend to have limited information technology knowledge, and not only misunderstand technology but try to break down things into simplistic language in when reality, they're complex matters now matter how much they're rephrased.
So, I guess it is more of an issue of trying to weigh up on one hand, informing customers of a product feature whilst at the same time realising that some aspects of technology are just plain well complex.
... namely stack-based buffer overflows that rely on an executable stack. There are a variety of other buffer-overflow attacks (e.g. return-to-libc, corruption of data rather than code, etc etc) for which NX has no effect. So while it's certainly quite useful, it's not a brick wall. As I understand it AMDs ad campaign claimed that this stopped viruses in general (not just specifically buffer overflows but viruses in general) which isn't true, there are a huge number of attack vectors other than buffer overflows.
Why do we have these anymore ?
Why don't the people at Monopolysoft start using more secure libraries with visual c/c++ ?
Performance hits are worth it.
On Windows systems, no, it's not buffer overflows that are the major problem and the CPU's capabilities with respect to flagging memory pages will do absolutely nothing. Humans install viruses on Windows systems. They fall for tricks, it's a social problem. Sure there are still some buffer overflow issues.
Cultural ..... if you like. Might want to define it like "The Dutch come from a very small country called Holland. In Holland there exists one very big company called Philips. Philips has a very well defined corporate point of view (I nearly said culture) regarding innovation which is not theirs"
Don't you folks have a saying "What's good for General Motors is good for America"? Well in Holland that goes "if it even might be bad for Philips, then it's shit".
As for herpes - I hear that, in America, they're not against it.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
Your's is the superior intellect!
I'm a big fan of self-correcting problems.
That said, can you guys start catching HIV and just get it over with?
I can't say I think the NX bit is really that big a deal, it only makes things a little harder when you can't execute code on the stack since a stack overflow lets you return program execution to any address on the system you want. Often a cleverly designed system call or another non-stack user controlled data structure will still allow the attacker to gain control.
Still it really does provide some virus protection which is alot more than can be said about most commercials. I mean is the 'lemon strength cleanser' actually a better cleanser because of the lemon. Is 'oxygenation' or whatever really important for skin care.
Maybe they manage to stop all these types of advertising exageration over there, and if so my hat is off to them. At least if they can really manage to do it objectively. Often these sorts of rules aren't applied evenly, letting false but dear cultural assumptions slide by but blocking correct but disconerting claims. For instance I have no doubt that if we had these sort of tight 'truth in advertising' laws in the US we would find condom ads forced to produce 3 peer-reviewed studies for every claim they make while gun ads would be allow to imply or outright say that carrying a gun makes you safer. But maybe other countries can pull this off, after all I'm always amazed the U.K. can function so well without an explicit constitution so who knows. If they can do it objectively my hats off to them.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Weed is legal, but is advertising weed legal?
I think he's being sarcastic. At least that's what I think when someone with a positive karma posts something like that. But maybe that's just me...
(for those that are annoyed by the "...", I guarantee that more's coming. Just hang around awhile.)
No, it's part of The Netherlands
I'm curious if there were any countries that had a similar reaction to past near-false advertising campaigns, such as the "The Pentium II makes the internet faster!" ad several years back.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
At the risk of sounding like a flame....
"fuck joe six pack"
Can you do plumbing, drywall, framing, roofing, siding, flooring, electical wiring, etc????
I'm sure you could do it with some training, but wait, who is going to train you? Joe Six Pack after you've "0wnz0r3d" his PC?
Not bloody likely.
The simple fact of the matter is that the human race an indeed technology owes it's position to specialization of skills. If you don't care about Joe Sixpack's PC experience then you are an elitist bastard.
It takes all kinds to make the world go round as they say and it is our job as the nerds/geeks/pointy head/whatever to make our part move you short sighted bastard.
** This post made while mostly drunk, 8 beers... Call me Joe 8 Pack, you asshat
Gold :)
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
Heck, most languages call other countries (and/or their native languages) by names that frequently have little relation to their native name. People in Byelorus even complain that germans call their country "white russia" instead of "byelorus", even though they call the German language "nyemetski" instead of "deutsch". So long as the information is passed, people need to quit pitching a fit about it. It's just the way language has developed.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Yes, I know what a buffer overflow is. I was just saying that AMD didn't have anything to worry about, and I was expressing my OPINION about how unnecessary virus protection is, as long as you're not a dumbass.
-gjr
There may be components in marijuana that can be medically useful, but using the plant itself (a mixture of a variety of beneficial and harmful components) isn't going to net one any benefits. It's somewhat akin to putting crude in your gasoline car versus using gasoline which is just one component refined from oil.
I'm dutch and i always refer to my country as Holland. Maybe because i actually live in this section (you're right about that), but think about this: whenever we play football (or 'soccer' for you americans) our songs sing of Holland, not Netherlands. I frankly don't care what people call my country, be it Holland or The Netherlands. What i do mind however is the fact that every foreigner thinks everybody here smokes weed, lives in a windmill and walks around on wooden shoes :P
Since he didn't specifically exclude South or Central America you could also add Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Columbia, Peru, Venezuela, Panama, Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Guyana, Ecuador, Honduras, etc.
Not quite. Some of the provinces of what is now the Netherlands (including North and South Holland) used to be independent regions until they formed the republic of the (Seven) United Netherlands in the 16th century.
(And yes...the declaration that was used to seal all this was partly used as a model when the United States were formed.)
ok, here goes. The Netherlands and Holland are one and the same, so they are different names for 1 country. Holland is an old name, you see, 'Hol' is an old word for wood in dutch (= the language of the netherlands), back in the day the whole country was full of trees so they basically called it 'Land of wood'.
...
The Netherlands means what it says; compared to sea level countries like belgium, holland and luxemburg lie very low (not sure if 'lie very low' is the correct way to say it but you catch what I mean.), about 16 meters or so below sea level. Since a few centuries ago the Netherlands consisted of belgium, holland an luxemburg, those countries were called 'the netherlands'. As in, 'the lands which lie nether'
Added confusion: Holland consists of 12 'provinces', not unlike a 'county' in the US. two of these counties are called 'North-Holland' and 'South-Holland'. Those are just names, and are only a small part of the country.
Philips, but also things like Unilever, Royal Dutch/Shell, KLM and Heineken are all dutch companies.
And me, being dutch myself, don't give a rats ass about what they think is good or bad
What i do mind however is the fact that every foreigner thinks everybody here smokes weed, lives in a windmill and walks around on wooden shoes
We don't really think that about the windmills and the shoes.
That NX has ALWAYS been around. It used to be enforced and used a long, long time ago...processors stopped respoding to it, so people got lazy and coded. It doesnt "break" anything anymore than Mozilla breaks badly coded CSS pages. You people who are saying that it causes more problems are completly ignoring the REAL problem, and that is substandard coders and code!
The AMD NX feature is a long, long overdue feature that processors have been missing for quite some time, and it can prevent a LOT of misuse. I admit that AMD has made it seem like its an end-all to viruses, but trying to explain it to non-technical people isn't a simple thing.
And quite right too, my AC friend. The fact that I'm not Dutch but that I do work for Philips distorts my point of view.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
So would all the JITs that everyone's built so far .. Remember that not all code blocks are loaded as readonly off the disk. I had to go through a couple of hoops to get portable.net to work on OpenBSD..
In short they would have to provide a way to mark a write-able buffer as executable - and I suppose you'd call it the next design mistake ?.
Read about PAE and JITs (hint: dotnet ships with AOT capabilities)..Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Because a processor with 64 bits of memory address bits can access more memory than one with only 32?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If your intellect is "supieror" in the same manner as your spelling, I don't think joe six pack has much to worry about the possibility of being owned by you.
There is a much more effective technology around since about 1988. IBM's AS/400 (now called "iSeries 400" or "eServer i5") has a feature called "Pointer in memory protection".
Every time when the processor writes an address into memory (for example, return addresses stored in stack memory by subroutine calls) the memory location is marked as containing a valid address by using a "shadowed" flag, a 65th bit (one bit of ECC memory is used, so the machine does not need special memory modules, just standard ECC memory modules). If that memory location is overwritten with data, the CPU automatically clears the "shadowed" flag. If the CPU tries to use a pointer as a memory address, that was overwritten with data before, it automatically generates an interrupt.
This feature was originally not designed to be a buffer overflow protection, but it was neccessary, because the AS/400 uses a so-called "single level storage", where all applications use the same address space. Therefore, the machine needed some method to prevent applications from writing to arbitrary locations in memory, and that's why pointer-in-memory-protection was invented.
Actually, the memory is also segmented, one segment for every "object" created by a program. Most buffer overflows can not even overwrite an address, because a character array will have its own object boundary.
For example, the following code will typically not generate a buffer overflow on an AS/400:
int main(void)
{
char space_a[20];
char space_b[20];
int i;
for (i = 0; i < 100; i++)
{
space_a[i] = 'A';
}
for (i = 0; i < 100; i++)
{
space_b[i] = 'B';
}
}
Just try it out, it should not even crash.
I tried a lot of things like these on an AS/400 Mod. 170 running V5R2 using IBM ILE C compiler.
I think, pointer protection using shadow flags is the right way to prevent execution of code inserted by exploiting buffer overflows, because all other protection methods can't prevent return-into-libc exploits, but the pointer-in-memory-protection can, so IMHO it is the only *real* protection.
Further reading: "The inside story of the IBM iSeries" by Frank Soltis (a book about the architecture of the iSeries and the POWER processors)
Of course since you had the Linux source code you could have fixed the problem yourself.
Middle mouse button? What useful feature does that have in Windows.
Gives you a place to rest your middle finger when it is being shaken at the screen.
Sure Holland's a country - although some Dutch would like to see all us foreigners get our tongues round "The Netherlands". In Dutch, Holland technically refers only to two of its provinces, but this ain't Dutch...
However - to the point - I can't see why the ad should be banned. After all, who would be using the latest ADM processors on machines running XP without installing SP2?
It sounds a bit silly to me. But all publicity is good publicity!
Rgds
Martin
Don't forget that this is the company that uses a very badly retouched Apple G4 Titanium Powerbook in its AMD64 adverts. I was waling down a street in Glasgow last week and saw it in a bus shelter. You could even see where the *artist* had tried to cover the Apple logo on the lid.
Now with Flouride protection!
This seems to be the post that hit the news:2 2383398#22383398
http://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_message/
fud = (etc + 1)
And coming from someone who can't even preview the post for correctness: Ouch.
I suspect it goes more like this: The only cunts you see are on your monitor and you got raging drunk surfing the porn sites. Then you wandered onto slashdot. Subsequently, you somehow fell off the pole you're sitting on, whacked your head on the floor and chipped your one remaining baby tooth. As befits a lemming such as yourself, you decide in a fit of rage to spout off the marketing hype you've managed to soak up in a post whose importance rivals that of your contribution to an actual productive program.
But as they say, "Perception is reality".
That is a part of the name of 2 provinces in the country called the Netherlands. (north and south Holland), it is not a country on its own.
Lets all call the USA New York...
Of course NX does not stop virusses and trojans. However, in itself it does only stop some memory corruption attacks, like simple stack overflows. But not many other types of memory corruption attacks.
NX is just one method to protect the integrity of the memory. What it basically does is that it allows an OS to implement separation between data and code in the memory of a running process. Many overflow and other attacks depend on writing data in the process memory and then executing it as if it was code. A virus or a trojan is usually a program. It depends on being run, not on memory corruption. Therefore protection against memory corruption brings you literally nothing.
NX in itself stops exploit writers for aproximately 15 minutes, which is the time it takes for them to adjust most of their overflows to make them work with NX. Only a hand full of attacks cannot be adjusted. So NX in itself doesn't bring you much, despite what the marketing departments of companies like AMD and Red Hat tell you.
The trick to provide good memory protection is not to only use NX, but to combine it with other protection methods. This is the approach taken by the PaX project http://pax.grsecurity.net/.
However, there are also some PaX imitations which, unfortunately, do not implement all of the PaX technology (even though some of them claim they do or claim to be even better). Examples are: MS-Windows SP2, Red-Hat's Exec-shield and OpenBSD's W^X.
Anyways, back from the technical intermezzo to AMD marketing. These guys have the same problem which people from the PaX project, exec-shield, OpenBSD and others who produce stuff like this have: Try to explain why this stuff is useful. If clever people like Linus don't get it, then how is one going to explain it to John Doe or the PHB's of this world? ``Memory corruption? Exploits? Buffer overflows?'' ``Woah! Brain overload!'' At least they have heard the word ``virus'' a few times and have learned that ``virus = bad''. So ``NX = good'', which cannot be explained to lusers, became ``NX = anti-virus = good''. Even if it is disabled by default, if you cannot motivate people to try to look for it, they never will.
Oh yes, these patches break things. Most programmers are spoiled. They think it is normal to mess around with memory in any way they like. Few of them understand that what is convenient for them, is also convenient for exploit writers. It's like MS-DOS programmers complaining about the file permissions on UNIX.
I hope AMD takes the challenge to produce better marketing, so more people start using this technology. Even though it is badly implemented in MS-Windows, it is a small step in the right direction.
Microsoft has anounced a new patch to stop social engineering... well acually its a minor addition to the windows xp firewall that may prevent a small portion of attacks... but people won't understand that...
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Quite a few virusses and hacks rely on buffer overflow errors. So eliminating that goes a long way.
In fact I think Dutch courts took it to far, or at least farther than they would have for other pruduct that mislead the public through advertising.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for truth in advertising, but this is selective justice.
I have yet to see one laundry detergent that fail to get your cum stains out of your mothers favorite sweater to actually get banned for false advertising.
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16 metres? are you on fucking crack? the lowest point is 6 metres below sealevel.
YARR! GOLD!
No, weed is not legal in the Netherlands. However the Police will do nothing if they find a small quantity that is clearly for personal use.
If large quantaties are found then the plants will be destroyed and the owner arrested and prosecuted.
Coffee shops are allowed to exist only because it keeps the drug use concentrated in a small area and thus controlable.
VINCENT
Yeah, it's legal, but is ain't a
hundred percent legal. I mean you
can't walk into a restaurant, open
up a laptop, and start settin' NX bits.
You're only supposed to hack in
your home or certain designated places.
JULES
Those are internet cafes?
VINCENT
Yeah, it breaks down like this:
it's legal to buy it, it's legal to
own it and, if you're the
proprietor of an internet cafe, it's
legal to sell it. It's legal to
carry it, which doesn't really
matter 'cause -- get a load of this
-- if the cops stop you, it's
illegal for this to search you.
Searching you is a right that the
cops in Amsterdam don't have.
Holland is _only_ those provinces. However "Netherlands" (or the Lowlands what is its more modern choice of worths) is not entirely safe either, since that can include Belgium and Luxembourg too.
Noord Holland, Zuid Holland, Utrecht, Gelderland, Overijsel, Drente, Friesland, Groningen, Noord Brabant, Zeeland, Limburg and Flevoland together make up the kingdom of the Netherlands.
There are 12 provinces. Holland as such simply does not exist.
And to you moderators who think this is redundant, maybe it would be if for once the editors would get it right. So far they never do, so the information is not redundant.
At first this flag was disabled by default because it was not comply with SPARCv8 ABI so some (mainly bad coded) applications that relied on the execution of code inside the stack could not run as expected. Sun collaborated with its huge community of developers to addresssome collateral effects and once resolved Sun published the new SPARCv9 ABI reference guide in which the stack is no longer mapped as executable.
Currently 64-bit Solaris applications running on SPARC don't need to worry about exploits that rely on malicious code execution due to stack overflows.
Email contact: https://privacybox.de/vescudero.msg (Key-ID: 0x82C47638) My bitcoin donation jar: 1HtXafVHH9vLfjcijmZubg
The German language thing seems to be somewhat common actually. In Polish it's niemecki for example.
This is all PERFECTLY true. You should never make that assumption! Especially in a kernel asthey tend to be locked down harder than user mode, usually due to single address space rather than per "process" protection schemes.
// VirtualLock... write code/data to lvdat....
In Win32 use VirtualAlloc and specify PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE in the flags. You have no problems at all. VirtualLock provides the address and then you can call it like a C function via a function pointer variable e.g....
typedef int (*FUNC)(void);
LPVOID lpvdat;
lpvdat = VirtualAlloc(NULL, 65536, MEM_COMMIT, PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE);
FUNC f = (FUNC)(lpvdat);
int res = f();
Now "poke" whatever code you want into lpvdat and EXECUTE.
NOW! can someone tell me how to do something similar in the Win2K/XP kernel???
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Of course, the whole mess doesn't exist in the Dutch language anyway. We live in Nederland, we speak Nederlands, and we call ourselves Nederlanders - all perfectly regular. If I called myself a "Hollander" in Dutch, I would be indicating I was from either South Holland or North Holland. If I do the same in English people understand I'm from the Netherlands.
Oh, and if the audience is American, they know I'm from the capital of a country known as Kopenhagen ;-) Sorry about that, but you must understand that American tourists who are not only lost, but in fact at least two entire countries removed from where they think they are, are the stuff of legend in Europe ;-)
Overwriting a return address with a new one is difficult because you need to find the correct place to call. It is much easier to insert your own code with the modified stack frame. Therefore NX (present on many other architectures) is actually a fairly major step.
See my journal, I write things there
I have to chuckle, we have had this "feature" on the IBM mainframes for over 30 years. I enjoy watching you youngters re-invent the wheel.
could be from the fact that the portuguese were the first europeans to get to japan, and we call holland "holanda". Just a mild variation there.
I used to joke about java being a 'write-once, debug many' language.
seems I was really being accurate even without knowing why.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Middle mouse button? What useful feature does that have in Windows.
Hrm... AutoCad, Maya3D, StudioMax, and anything else that is a 3d'ish design program really require a 3rd mouse button with a good deal of the features.
Dragging with holding the left, right, middle mouse buttons all do different things as far as expanding, extracting, etc etc as well as different context menus. I could acheive many things without the 3rd mouse button but it would require me to grow a 3rd hand for the keyboard to keep at the same workflow speed.
Although I bet you didn't know that you already have a middle mouse button on your scroll wheel... So any MS scroll wheel mouse works fine for these programs.
That and 3rd mouse (and 4th, 5th...) buttons are really helpful with FPS games.
In the print versions sold locally (e..g in the HCC magazine) it is even more obvious as you see the whole machine.
Dw.
Actually, KLM has ceased to be a company, let alone a dutch one. It's now a part of Air France.
in my opinion, yes. It encourages sloppy programming practise. Why bother checking for buffer overruns and fixing them when the processor can be forced to just not do anything if they occur.
is that the campain was misleading. AMD stated their campain in such a way that it sounded like you don't need any virus protection any more.
Which we all know, isn't true.
By the way: Holland ins't the same as The Netherlands. Holland is just a small part in the west of The Netherlands. To make it more confusing: Zeeland and Friesland are also part of The Netherlands
Privacy is terrorism.
It must use an IEEE-754 hidden-one representation...
Program Intellivision!
NX has very little todo with viruses. It only protects against executation of code in the stack area of programs. This stomps out those pesky buffer overflow and format string attacks. But there are still a good number of attacks left.
NX
The first bit of Palladium.
I've been using the equivalent of NX on Solaris/SPARC for a couple years, now. Everything works as expected. Self-modifying code is dumb, anyway.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
Quite possible. Is H silent in Portuguese as it is in Spanish? If so, that would certainly be where it came from.
Moll.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Hee hee, you said "Noord!"
Hrm... AutoCad, Maya3D, StudioMax, and anything else that is a 3d'ish design program really require a 3rd mouse button with a good deal of the features.
Those are really program features and not features specific to windows.
Dragging with holding the left, right, middle mouse buttons all do different things as far as expanding, extracting, etc etc as well as different context menus.
Well, here I am in windows, I can't seem to do anything with that "copied" 3rd mouse button in the apps included with the OS. It won't copy a file, it won't bring up a context menu, it won't paste anything, it won't even select or focus anything most of the time. I've only tried IE, notepad, and Explorer, but those are some pretty major Microsoft Windows OS applications. Now in X, the middle mouse button pastes virtually regardless of the application I'm using. Perhaps you meant to say that someone copied Autocad (incidently, didn't that run in DOS before Windows 3.0?) or some other app, maybe. Though I'm pretty sure the 3 button mouse wasn't created explicitly because of Autocad (though probably because of many similiar in-house applications).
Although I bet you didn't know that you already have a middle mouse button on your scroll wheel... So any MS scroll wheel mouse works fine for these programs.
Surely you know what assuming does? Alas, my Linux box is equipped with one of those "new-fangled" scroll mice (Logitech MX700), in fact I was using it to describe the function of the third button in X. I did have a 3 button mouse, but that was back when I had Windows where it's only function outside some specialized, non-Microsoft apps (e.g. Autocad) was as a finger rest.
That and 3rd mouse (and 4th, 5th...) buttons are really helpful with FPS games.
I guess I should have just summed it up as, "I was referring to Microsoft [specifically Windows], not your X-name app manufactured by someone other than Microsoft." Hopefully though, you didn't need to read this far to figure that out.
Apps simply have to be coded correctly. Sun's JVM works just fine, and anyone else's should too. If you find something that doesn't work, you should tell the morons that wrote it to fix it.
Wait... so you mean I've been living in a windmill for all these years just because I thought everybody else here did it?
There may be components in marijuana that can be medically useful, but using the plant itself (a mixture of a variety of beneficial and harmful components) isn't going to net one any benefits. It's somewhat akin to putting crude in your gasoline car versus using gasoline which is just one component refined from oil.
What a great argument! Just say the opposite of what the first poster said and we should believe you because??? I forgot, this is slashdot where proof or a reasonable argument composed of factual points isn't allowed. No study on MJ has ever come to the conclusion that you brilliantly reached and claim that we should all just accept. Are you sure you don't work for DARE?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
could be from the fact that the portuguese were the first europeans to get to japan, and we call holland "holanda". Just a mild variation there.
Not just that. The Dutch traders who established a trading post in Japan were from the state of Holland. No trading companies from Zeeland or Friesland or other states in the Federated Netherlands ever went there. Zeeland mostly traded with the Americas, and Friesland with northern Europe.
Cities like Amsterdam and states like Holland could have independent diplomatic relations with foreign powers like Japan, and they could also make war independently - even on eachother. The new bureaucracy of the federation was tiny compared to the ancient state bureaucracy of Holland. Only in the 18th century people started identifying with the (plural) 'Netherlands' as a whole.
Of course even in the 16th and 17th century you would have seriously pissed of someone from Zeeland or Friesland by telling him he is from the Holland. It is like calling a Scotsman English.
Heck, most languages call other countries (and/or their native languages) by names that frequently have little relation to their native name. People in Byelorus even complain that germans call their country "white russia" instead of "byelorus", even though they call the German language "nyemetski" instead of "deutsch". So long as the information is passed, people need to quit pitching a fit about it. It's just the way language has developed.
True. In many cases a state has merely kept an old name that once applied to it. The sensitivities With Belgium/Netherlands/Holland, Dutch/Flemish/Netherlandic are a bit more complicated because there is some competition for names involved. Every country in this area of Europe carries a strange name, often invented by others.
Long ago in the time of the Frankish empire all continental germans spoke variants of the 'lingua theodisca', or Teutonic/Dutch/Diets/Duutsc/Deutch. Subvarieties of this language are for instance Franconian/low Franconian/low Saxon.
German traders visiting the English coast were called 'Dutch', and most of these traders obviously came from the north sea coast (speaking low Franconian or Saxon). This is were the principalities of Holland and Flanders were.
The North sea coast region as a whole was called 'the Netherlands', or 'Belgica' in Latin. In the 16th century the 17 Netherlands split in two states: The Royal Netherlands (Belgica Regia, including most of Flanders and Brabant) and the Federated Republic of the Netherlands (Belgica Foederata, including Holland).
Most traders from the Federated Republic that visited England were from Holland, the most powerful member state, and would have identified themselves as such. The name 'Holland' for the Republic stuck in English. Only people from Holland like it.
In Belgica Regia the civilized languages remained French and Latin, and it became 'Belgium'. Belgica Foederata became the 'Netherlands', evolving a standardized language 'Netherlandic' based on low Franconian. The names Belgium and the Netherlands thus originally refer to the same area.
The states east of the Netherlands formed the Norddeutschen Bund (the North German League), and later became 'Deutschland' (Germany). This country also standardized its language (Hochdeutsch, or High German). The nation was formed under the leadership of Prussia, which is itself not a part of the area called Dutch/Deutsch by the Franks.
From this point on the Dutch did not like being called Dutch anymore, because the Germans appropriated that word (with the implied threat of being inclusive of other 'german' nations). So 'Netherlandic' is better than 'Dutch' since the 19th century. 'Dutch' simply means 'German' to us (and some may return the favor by calling all Englishspeaking people 'Anglosaxons').
However most Dutchspeaking Belgians like 'Netherlandic' less, because it reminds them of their quarrelsome neighbor, the Netherlands. They would marginally prefer to speak 'Dutch', or even better: 'Flemish'.
The (unrecognized) language 'Flemish' does exist, and is spoken by tiny rural minorities along the coast in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The vast majority of Dutchspeaking Belgians very clearly speak (less standardized Brabantic dialects of) Dutch, however. Even if they want to call it Flemish.
Some small leftovers: the Frenchspeaking Belgians call themselves Walloons, and that derives from the Germanic/Dutch word Walah/Waal, meaning 'foreigner'. Just like the Welsh in England. The French themselves, and their language, have hardly any relationship with the Franks and the Francionian language other than the fact that Frank warlords ruled them for centuries.
Sorry, but I wont get offended when a pole smoker tries to flame me for spewing AMD commercialism when AMD hardly invented the concept. Considering that the Alpha had it and now that Intel has decided retro fit it to thier designs with it, this statefull memory allocation concept is something you incompetent dipshits better get used to.
Again, learn to write quality code or fuck off and die.
And for you, flametroll, you might want to pull that cock lollipop out of your mouth from time to time. Pity your post had no point other than to pounce on typographical errors and project your life story upon me.
Call me when you can actually write a few lines in something other than VB.
In order to determine what NX does, we must look back at what people have created fake NX bits for in the past. This has been used on x86 for security purposes for a while.
Let's go back a few years, to late 2000, when PaX was created. PaX (Article) emulated an NX bit on x86 with a low-to-high and potentially extreme level of overhead depending on memory usage. Later on, a new method was devised to do this emulation with a low level of overhead, but restricted the VM space to 1.5GiB (which didn't really matter anyway).
PaX later introduced ASLR as well, to randomly arrange the address space. This can be easily defeated by reading the global offset table, or GOT; however, the GOT offset is stored in a register, and the GOT itself is stored in a randomly placed segment of memory. Finding existing useful data and program code for ret2libc attacks requires reading the GOT; reading the GOT requires finding the GOT; and finding the GOT requires injecting code.
PaX used its newly emulated NX bit to prevent the root problem from occuring. It made a definite and permenant separation between executable memory and data areas. Any memory created as executable had to be initially loaded with the code, either by mmap() or by the kernel reading in an executable .text segment. These segments couldn't become writable unless they dropped executability. Other segments could freely change read and write permissions; but they could never add the executable protection, even if they were non-writable.
Under these restrictions, code could still easily be injected into a running program, as long as it wasn't being injected into executable memory--which was never allowed to be writable for any period. Once the process changed the PC to that code, however, the CPU would trigger a segmentation fault, which PaX would handle by killing the program and complaining in the kernel log about an illegal execution attempt. In this way, only code existing in executable segments at link time (load-time or dlopen()/dlsym() linking) could be executed. This also meant that existing code could not be executed out of order without extreme luck and a blind guess as to where that code would be, since the randomization could not be examined by an attacker.
Later, in 2003, two new technologies appeared. One was OpenBSD's W^X, and another was RedHat's Exec Shield. Both used a new, fast method of approximately emulating an NX bit; however, this method was flawed; mprotect()ing a higher memory address breaks the emulation so that you get a full executable layout below that point. Unlike PaX, these also did not and do not constrict mprotect() to safe combinations. Interestingly, PaX' original logic for emulation was augmented with this new method later, but with a fallback to the original logic if the flaw was activated. The new SEGMEXEC logic was still kept, and is still recommended by many who use PaX.
There were compatibility issues with all of these. ES relied on a binary marking that would mprotect() the stack or heap on load automatically, to be executable. The ASLR in ES still had to be disabled system-wide, to my understanding, if there were compatibility issues. This was not a robust solution.
If PaX breaks something, some PaX flags can be set on the affected binary executable to A) De-restrict mprotect(); B) make all of VM executable; C) disable ASLR. This only affects the particular program itself. Trampolines can be detected and allowed if desired as well (per-binary); and RELROs can be specially set to be mprotect()able freely (system-wide).
All of these methods have some level of overhead; and some of them are inaccurate and will relax restrictions excessively under certain circumstances. These problems stem mainly from the methods of emulation used. With a hardware NX bit, however, the NX logic is handled natively by the CPU. The inaccuracies of the W^X and ES emulation method, and the
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What a great argument! Just say the opposite of what the first poster said and we should believe you because??? I forgot, this is slashdot where proof or a reasonable argument composed of factual points isn't allowed. No study on MJ has ever come to the conclusion that you brilliantly reached and claim that we should all just accept.
I'm sorry, somehow you must have missed the links or not read them. Let's just go with the DOJ one. It says (and references) studies linking the smoking of MJ with higher lung cancer rates (as did the CNN link). The DOJ also mentions things like "400 chemicals" in MJ. Also it mentions the beneficial uses of THC as well as an ongoing study of MJ compounds being studied for their beneficial uses. So, those of us with some brain cells can conclude:
A) Some of those 400 chemicals must be good if they are studying them for beneficial uses
B) Some of those 400 chemicals must be bad (linked to cancer - the CNN link even)
I didn't think it neccesary to summarize the points of the articles, after all it is OT anyhow. Clearly I forgot about those that cannot follow and then read a link. I sincerely apologize but I'm at a loss on how to proceed seeing as you cannot chain together these few links and follow the logic without a long step-by-step explanation. My statement was merely a summary of the articles, though it is true that the comparison to crude oil was completely fabricated by myself. I did not reference that from any of the links.
So, I'm puzzled by your hostility. Perhaps that's just the addiction talking?
Are you sure you don't work for DARE?
I think I would remember; even the acronym escapes me at this particular moment. Are they extremists? Perhaps much like you except on the other side of the fence?
And for you, flametroll, you might want to pull that cock lollipop out of your mouth from time to time. Pity your post had no point other than to pounce on typographical errors and project your life story upon me.
I'm sorry, that's all I got from your post. That and some things that had already been mentioned, in a friendlier tone, no less. It sounded like a flame to me as there was much insulting.
I must admit being genuinely surprised to have struck such a chord with one who looks so far down upon the IT community, let alone slashdot's.
Not that I really disagree with those points between the insults, I actually agree. It is simply your approach that has left me responding in like.
Yeah, the word is similar in all slavic languages. It essentially means "tongue-less", a mildly dismissive term applied to Germans in Russia who didn't speak Russian.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
1. "Holland" is not a country; "The Netherlands" is a country.
2. This is not likely to have a large impact on what AMD is trying to accomplish because the Netherlands is not a large or populous country.
Read my blog: HansMast.com
erm, Why is this modded troll? It should be insightful!
Read my blog: HansMast.com
MOD PARENT DOWN
Wrong. Holland is a large province in The Netherlands that sort of dominates Dutch politics and history. (Administratively, it's two provinces nowadays.) Some people use "Holland" and "The Netherlands" interchangably, just as some people say "England" when they mean "Great Britain". But just as Scots and Welshpeople resent being called "English", I suspect that a lot of Frieslanders and Brabantians resent being called Hollanders.
I'm afraid not friend.
The name Holland in this and the other entries on this page ultimately stem from holt land ("wooded land").
Upgrade your knowledge
Check the North and South holland thing to. However, in South-Holland (the province) lies Amsterdam, so it does somewhat dominate the Netherlands politicaly as you pointed out. I am Dutch btw.
I'm sorry, what are you trying to say? You tell me I'm wrong, then you point me at a Wikipedia article that says the same thing I said. And what does the etymology of "Holland" have to do with anything?
I interpreted your comment as that you were trying to say that holland is just the name of the provinces. It isn't, that's why I pointed out that Holland is merely an older word for the country now know as the netherlands. Ow well, doesn't matter.
I live here by the way; in 'Roosendaal' in the south exactly between a city called 'Breda' and one called 'Bergen op Zoom'. It's a shame those maps don't include us btw because were bigger then 'Bergen op Zoom'.
That's interesting.
Aborigines in the north of Australia had a word for white people before (as far as history can tell) whites ever came to our sunny shores.
It turns out that the northern Aborigines did a fair bit of trade with Indonesians who would sail south to fish for trepang. The Indonesians knew the Dutch (or whatever we call them---this thread's confusing me) and called them 'Ballander,' derived from 'Hollander.'
Along with a lot of other Indonesian words, it somehow found its way into the Aboriginal languages up north, and spread around a bit---having never seen white people the Aborigines incorporated into some of the myths, which had white ghost type people in them.
As far as I know, the word 'Ballander' is still used to refer to white people in a lot of Aboriginal communities today, especially in the north.
Cogito, ergo sig.